Intentionality, as Brentano originally introduced the term in modern
philosophy, was meant to provide a distinctive characteristic definitively
separating the mental from the physical.(1)
Mental states have an intrinsic relationship to an object, to that which
they are "about." Physical entities just are what they are, they cannot,
by their very essence, refer to anything, they have no "outreach", as one
might put it. Mental states have, as it were, an incomplete essence, they
cannot exist at all unless they are completed by something other than themselves,
their object. Brentano's position is opposed to all theories which represent
the mental as only extrinsically related to the world, that is, to all
theories in which mental states are themselves self-sufficient for their
own existence and only secondarily relate to the world by means of something
external to their nature, e.g., neurological causation, divine intervention,
or pre-established harmony. In these later cases, any mental act whatsoever
could be related to any object, or indeed to none, for the relation is
external to the nature of the act, it is superimposed on it by outside
forces. Brentano's point is that a mental act has, by its very essence,
an Intentional object without which it would not be a mental act. It would
therefore appear that since causality is an external relationship which
could in principle relate any two things regardless of their nature, the
Intentional relation between an act and its object cannot be a causal relation.

Husserl borrowed Brentano's concept of Intentionality, but used it in
a "transcendental" scheme: Intentionality is a process of constitution,
of meaning-giving, and so must be radically distinguished from that which
has been given meaning, the object. Physical things, objects of nature,
and causal processes, as constituted entities, are dependent for their
meaning on a transcendental Intentionality which cannot therefore, on pain
of circularity, be reduced to, or explained by, any physical process. Transcendentalism,
then, involves a dualism (though not a dualism of substance) between Intentionality
on the one hand and nature and causality on the other. It is this dichotomy
that any attempt at a naturalistic theory of Intentionality must overcome.(2)

John Searle attempts, in Intentionality, to develop such a naturalistic
theory.(3) In what follows I will present
briefly the central points of his theory of Intentionality. In my discussion
of the theory, I will look at three issues: The nature of the mental state
to which Searle attributes Intentionality; his notion of Intentional causation
by which he hopes to bridge the transcendentalist gap between the Intentional
and the causal; and the relationship of the mental structures of Intentionality
to the physical structures of the brain, a relationship that Searle understands
as causal.

OUTLINE OF SEARLE'S POSITION

John Searle accepts Brentano's basic definition of Intentionality as
the logical property of being about an object, though he usually substitutes
states of affairs for objects. Borrowing from Frege's notion of Sinn,
Searle maintains that every Intentional state has an Intentional content
which determines conditions of satisfaction for the state. It is through
the Intentional content that the Intentional state is linked to its object.
The state can then be said to "represent" the state of affairs which satisfy
these conditions, though this is a purely logical characteristic implying
no images or "representations": Intentional states "represent" only in
the sense that language can be said to "represent." Each state also has
a psychological mode which determines the direction of fit: mind to world
or world to mind. In belief, for example, validity (in this case truth)
is achieved when the mind matches the world; in a valid (i.e., successful)
desire the world must come to match the mind. The conditions of satisfaction
for many Intentional states include a self-referential clause; perception,
for example, has as part of its very meaning that it be a state caused
by the object represented in it. This aspect of the Intentional content
remains even in hallucinatory experiences in which the conditions of satisfaction
are not met.

For example, Searle would analyze my Intentional state of seeing a car
as:

I have a visual experience with mind to world fit whose Intentional
content is (there is a car before me and that there is a car before me
is causing this visual experience).(4)

With this ingenious apparatus, Searle is able to give a very interesting
account of the relationship of mind and language to the world and to each
other which offers solutions to many of the puzzles of recent philosophical
theories of mind and language.

In Searle's theory it will be useful for us to distinguish four relationships
between Intentional states and reality: Language to object, Intentional
state to object, Intentional state to psychological infrastructure, and
Intentional state to neurological infrastructure. I will explain the first
three in turn, and then offer some criticisms, leaving consideration of
the fourth relationship, based on a special kind of causality, to a later
section of the paper.

Language relates to reality, in Searle's approach, by speakers so relating
it in their speech acts. Speakers use sentences to represent the
meaning they wish to express (22, 197). The understanding of linguistic
meaning therefore depends on our analysis of mental Intentional states,
and so the relationship of language to reality reduces to a special case
of the relationship of mind to the world.

Mental Intentional states, according to Searle, do not relate to reality
in the same way that words do. We cannot use a belief, for example,
in one way rather than another, for its Intentional content determines
its own conditions of satisfaction. To say otherwise would require us to
invent an infinite regress of mysterious agents, homunculi, each using
the representational states of the lower homunculi to mean something (21).
The buck must stop somewhere. Searle stops it at the first Intentional
state, maintaining that its Intentional content logically and intrinsically
determines its own conditions of satisfaction. A belief that the moon is
red cannot be used to mean the cat is black, even though the sentence "the
moon is red" could, if we chose to use it that way.

On the other hand, Intentional states, Searle maintains, are only empirically
linked to the psychological experiences which embody them. Perception,
for example, involves "perceptual experiences", though it is to be distinguished
from them (38). Perception, as an Intentional state, has propositional
content, i.e., Intentional content, but it also involves conscious mental
acts. These must not be confused: "One can say of a visual experience that
it has a certain temporal duration or that it is pleasant or unpleasant,
but these properties of the experience are not to be confused with its
Intentional content" (43). "The material object can only be the object
of visual perception because the perception has an Intentional content,
and the vehicle of the Intentional content is a visual experience" (61,
cf. 58). Searle considers the arguments of those who deny the existence
of such psychological experiences, and even presents pathological examples
of "blind sight" in which patients claiming to have no visual experience
of an object can nonetheless "see" it in some way, for they can answer
correctly questions about it (47). Yet he remains convinced that perceptual
Intentional states, at least, are in fact related to "experiences", even
though the relationship is not logically required.

Searle summaries his position as follows:

The claim that the Intentionality of vision is characteristically realized
in visual experiences which are conscious mental events is a genuine empirical
ontological claim, and in that respect it contrasts with the claim that
beliefs and desires contain propositions as Intentional content. ... The
claim that there are visual experiences really adds something to the claim
that there are visual perceptions, since it tells us how the content of
those preceptions is realized in our conscious life. Someone who claimed
that there was a class of beings capable of perceiving optically, that
is, beings capable of visual perception but who did not have visual experiences,
would be making a genuine empirical claim. But if someone claimed that
there was a class of beings who literally had hopes, fears, and beliefs,
and who made statements, assertions, and commands, all with their various
logical features, but who did not have propositional content, then such
a person doesn't know what he's talking about or else is simply refusing
to adopt a notation, for the claim that there are propositional contents
isn't in any way an additional empirical claim. It is rather the adoption
of a certain notational device for representing common logical features
of hopes, fears, beliefs, statements, etc (46-47).

THE NOTION OF AN INTENTIONAL
STATE

I want first, on the basis of this citation, to look at Searle's notion
of an Intentional state before examining the issue of causality. The above
citation seems very clear, but unfortunately this clarity is not representative
of all of Searle's book, which, on these points, suffers from numerous
slippages of sense. His position that "an object is referred to in virtue
of satisfying an Intentional content" (222), implies that it is not in
virtue of its mode of realization that an Intentional state refers to an
object. Searle, however, not only fails to say this explicitly, but, despite
his distinction between perception and visual experience, continually speaks
of visual (and other) experience itself as presenting a state of affairs
(46), as being satisfied or unsatisfied (50), as having an Intentional
content (56), as determining conditions of satisfaction (61), and so on.
This is an easy mode of expression, and often causes no difficulty, but
strictly speaking it is incorrect: It is not the visual experience as a
mental event which has conditions of satisfaction, but the perceptual state
that possesses these logical properties, and it does so, not in virtue
of the perception involving a visual experience, but in virtue of it having
an Intentional content. Having attributed the logical properties of Intentionality
to "perception," Searle goes on to speak of "perceptual experience" (45),
then more loosely of "experience" without qualifying it as visual or perceptual
(68). It is not surprising after these verbal shifts that he slips easily
into speaking of "visual experiences" as themselves having conditions of
satisfaction (76-77).

The argument that Intentional content is not "used" to refer to an object,
but by its logical structure intrinsically determines its object itself,
seems plausible. It cannot, however, be extended in this surreptitious
manner to include a claim that a visual experience (as opposed to a perceptual
state) is logically related to its object. Visual experiences are only
empirically related to Intentional content. We could imagine a non-human
creature whose perception of a tree, while having the same Intentional
content, is realized in a radically different psychological structure,
or perhaps in none at all as the blind sight case suggests. As psychological
events, visual experiences are neutral with respect to reference, as neutral
as words, and only when they realize specific Intentional contents do they
take on logical properties as satisfied or unsatisfied, fulfilled or unfulfilled,
true or false.

It is therefore misleading to say that "there is no way to describe
my visual experience without saying what it is an experience of"
(43). A visual experience is not itself, strictly, of anything,
it just is. Only when it takes on logical properties, only when it acquires
an Intentional content can it be about an object. Perception, and
other Intentional states logically determine conditions of satisfaction
and thereby refer to an object. Visual experiences do so only secondarily,
empirically, contingently, in so far as they are related to Intentional
content by what Searle calls "realization."

But what is the relationship of realization? That is, how can a psychological
process come to have an Intentional content? How can such a state take
on the logical property of having conditions of satisfaction? The link
from content to psychological state needs explanation: Why this state with
that content? The answer that works for words, "because we give it that
content, we use it that way," fails here for two reasons. First,
we would be at a loss to know what to do if asked to use one of our psychological
states to intend something different; indeed we have no awareness of using
psychological states for anything. Secondly, this approach would lead us
back into the infinite homunculi difficulty, as Searle himself explains
clearly (21). So realization cannot be explicated by the notion of "use."

I submit that Searle cannot tell us what realization is from within
his naturalistic framework, for he lacks the notion of transcendental subject.
The closest he comes to the concept is his notion of "homunculus," which
appears to be but a set of psychological states. But psychological states
are objects like any other. They can, for example, be the objects of Intentional
states. They would therefore seem, like words, to be available for use
in expressing whatever one might wish. But by whom? Not everything can
be "used by", for we must finally reach "something that does the using
and so is not used," i.e., the subject. Searle is caught in a bind. On
the one hand he accepts that objects which can be used to express meaning,
such as words, depend for their meaning on the user, the "meaner" of the
meanings, and that no infinite regress can be permitted along this line.
On the other hand, the only possible candidate in his system for stopping
point is a psychological state or set of states, but such states seem themselves
but objects to be used.

A way out might be found in Searle insistance that his concept of Intentional
content is purely logical, that it has no "ontological" status. If he could
associate a purely logical subject, something like a transcendental ego,
with this content, his search for a ultimate stopping point would be accomplished.
An Intentional content, as he sees, has no being other than its meaning;
there is no contingency between its being and its meaning, and so there
is no danger of regress. Realization, then, would be the use by such a
transcendental subject of psychological states to express a meaning, a
relation analogous to the use of words.

Searle's naturalism, however, prohibits this solution. Only natural,
psychological states can function as users, and so the realization of Intentional
content in psychological states is left incomprehensible. Or rather, the
gap between them is covered over by a verbal equivocation.

To summarize, then, Searle introduces two different relations. There
is the relation between Intentional content and reality in the sense of
the object intended, and this link of mind to reality is, according to
Searle, logical. There is also the link of the content to reality in the
sense of the psychological state in which it is realized, and this, Searle
claims, is contingent. By a slippage of meaning, Searle thinks that he
has been able to show a logical and Intentional relation between psychological
state and intended object, but his naturalism makes the crucial link, the
concept of realization, incomprehensible.

One form of the "transcendental gap" in Husserl is the incomparable
nature of transcendental Intentionality and any mode of objective being,
including psychological states. The very first step in any naturalistic
theory is the capturing of the logical in the psychological, a preliminary
to the attempt to relate both to the physical. I will examine the second
step later; what I am suggesting here is that Searle has not managed to
achieve even this first step. The relation between Intentional state and
psychological state, or, as Husserl might put it, between the transcendental
and the empirical, is as mysterious as ever.

INTENTIONAL CAUSALITY

One of Searle's most interesting points is his theory of the Intentional
relationship between Intentional state and its object in the case of perception
and action. In both these cases, as we have seen, he maintains that a self-referential
causal element is involved. It is part of the Intentional content of perception
that the experience be caused by the object perceived. Similarly, the Intentional
content of an action includes a requirement that the desired result be
caused by the action itself. This is the notion of "Intentional causation."
Self-referential causality permits him to link the intrinsically general
sense of the Intentional content to the singular, concrete nature of the
actual world grasped or modified in a particular act. The causal relation
is then subsumed as part of the very content or meaning of the Intentional
state, while not ceasing to be causal. This theory of "Intentional causation"
would be a brilliant synthesis if it were successful. In particular, as
he points out himself, it would be a major step towards "naturalizing Intentionality"
and would enable him to reject the view that Intentionality is transcendental,
beyond the natural world (112). Surprisingly, however, the direct target
of his arguments is not a transcendentalist such as Husserl, but Hume.

What does Searle mean by Intentional causation? He maintains that Intentional
causation is but a sub-species of causation in general. Positively the
notion of cause is difficult to define; there is little we can say about
it. Since we all perceive and act, however, we all have the direct experience
of "making something happen"(123). If I did not experience the car as making
my perceptual state happen, then my experience would not be one of "perceiving
the car." The general notion of cause is derived from this primitive experience.
Searle contrasts the notion of cause that we gain in this way with the
traditional, i.e., Humean, account on three central points: causation need
not be unobservable; causation is not based on universal regularity; and
the causal relation is not to be opposed to logical relations. I will look
at the first two only briefly and the third in more detail.

Hume claims we can observe only a chain of events, never a causal link
between them. Against this, Searle maintains that in action and perception
we experience the causal relation itself; this is Intentional causation
on which our general notion of cause is based. This "experience", however,
is of a peculiar sort: A cause is not "observed" or "seen" as the object
of an experience (49, 124), it is given as an essential part of the Intentional
content of the experience. While Searle explicitly rejects the Kantian
theory that causality is an a priori concept, his own position is closer
to it than he seems ready to admit. He claims Intentional causation is
not discovered in an empirical, contingent manner like a table, or gravitation;
it is intrinsic to the innate or logical structure of perception and action.
As Kant might put it, cause is experiential in that it is an a priori form
of our experience, not in the sense that it is a contingent element of
experience. Although they may differ on many other points, Kant and Searle
agree that we do not discover causality as an empirical feature of the
natural or psychological worlds. It is a logical feature inherent in perception
and action.

Secondly, despite Hume's analysis, regularity is not implied by the
notion of Intentional causation, according to Searle. My thirst causes
me to drink this time, but it might not next time; it's up to me (118).
I think this is a weak argument on two grounds. First, it fails to mention,
much less discuss, the traditional distinction between reason and cause:
If thirst is a reason for my action and not a cause of it, then Searle's
position would be untenable. Second, even if thirst is a cause, it may
not be a sufficient cause, in the sense that it could not alone explain
the occurrence of the effect. If the same condition of thirst occured a
second time without subsequent drinking, the difference between the two
cases would remain unexplained, and one would be led to presume that some
other, as yet undetected factor was at work. A claim that one had found
the sufficient cause which explains why the event occured would involve
an assumption that the effect would invariably follow the cause
in all future cases. I think that the most that Searle could claim here
is that there are loose, informal uses of the term "cause" in which people
haven't thought through the implications of what they are saying. As the
term is used scientifically, regularity is implied (though it may not be
the essence, as Hume thought).

Searle's arguments against regularity and unobservability, however much
they may undermine the Humean account of causality, do not bear significantly
on the transcendentalist's dichotomy of Intentionality and causality. The
rejection of the non-observability of causation, even if correct, does
not bridge the gap. One who believes that causation is always natural will
not be forced to change their mind if they agree that "making things happen"
rather than regularity is the essence of causality. The basic issue facing
an naturalist is that meanings, ideas, Intentional contents, and so on,
appear to take part in relationships of a radically different order than
those between objects of the natural world. The difficulty crops up in
one form even in Hume, though he is hardly a transcendentalist, and appears
in his contrast of the external, contingent nature of causal relations
with the necessary nature of internal, logical relations. It is in this
form that Searle attacks the issue.

Searle argues that, despite Hume, an object which is the (Intentional)
cause of a perception is logically or internally, rather than contingently,
related to the Intentional content of that perception. The cause of my
perception of the table must, logically, be the very table which fulfills
the conditions of satisfaction laid down by the Intentional content of
the perception. Hence the causal relationship, at least in the case of
Intentional causation, is not a purely empirical relationship, but involves
an element of meaning. Intentional causation gets beyond Hume's logical/empirical
dichotomy and so bridges what I have called the transcendental gap. This
is a very interesting argument, but I think it is unsound for the following
reasons.

Searle himself points out a "harmless" ambiguity in the notion of "conditions
of satisfaction." It may refer to a "requirement", i.e., that which would
have to be met if my perception or belief were to be true. The requirement
is internal to the Intentional content and remains the same whether the
perception is hallucinatory or veridical. But "conditions of satisfaction"
may also refer to the state of affairs in the world which actually satisfies
the Intentional state, if the state is true, the "thing required" (13).
In a similar way, I think we must distinguish between the "cause-as-requirement,"
which is determined by the Intentional content of, say, a perception, and
the "actual-cause" of that experience. In a veridical perception of a table
these coincide, for part of the Intentional content is that the experience
be caused (cause-as-requirement) by the table, and it in fact is caused
(actual-cause) by it. In an hallucination of a table the cause-as-requirement
is still the table, but the actual-cause is something else, for example,
a drug or electric brain-probe.

Searle argues that we can get the direct "experience" (in his special
sense) of causation, and hence the general notion of causality, from what
I have called the cause-as-requirement even if it does not coincide with
the actual-cause, and I am willing to grant him this point (130). The argument
does not however help him to establish that there is a logical relation
between the Intentional content and the cause of a particular perception.

There is indeed a logical relation between the fact that a perceptual
experience is "of a table" and the Intentional content having "the table"
as its cause-as-requirement. But since there is no guarantee that the conditions
of satisfaction of the Intentional content are being met (it may be an
hallucination), there is no logical necessity that the actual-cause be
the table. Let us grant Searle's argument that it is a logical necessity
that in a veridical perception the actual-cause must coincide with the
cause-as-requirement. Since veridicality is itself a purely empirical relation,
this does not establish his claim that there is a logical link between
Intentional content and actual-cause. The perceptual experience "of a table"
might be caused by an elephant. It would not thereby cease to be the perceptual
experience "of a table," which it must logically be. It is simply false,
hallucinatory. In veridical experiences the cause-as-requirement and the
actual-cause coincide, but that the experience is a veridical one is, on
Searle's theory, purely contingent. The truth-value of an experience may
depend logically on the conditions of satisfaction, among other things,
but this does not imply that the actual-cause is logically dependent on
them. Hence Searle has not shown that there is an internal relation between
the Intentional content and the actual-cause.

So nothing in the Humean dichotomy between logical and causal is undermined
by Searle's analysis. The actual-causal relation may still be completely
external, contingent, unpredictable by reason. The relation of Intentional
content to cause-as-requirement may still be purely rational, logical,
internal. The value of the perception, i.e., its veracity, is logically
dependent on the contingent matching of cause-as-requirement and actual-cause,
but why would a Humean object to that? Yet if Searle cannot make his case
that Intentional causation is a logically necessary relationship, then
his main argument, not only against Hume, but against the transcendentalist
position, collapses.

Hence I submit that Searle's theory of Intentional causation has failed
to bridge the transcendentalist's gap between Intentionality and natural
causality, which he claims was the main object of his strategy. His arguments
against regularity and unobservability interpretations of causality, even
if correct, are of little relevance to the issue. The relevant argument,
that against the purely external nature of Intentional causal relations,
founders on an ambiguity he indicated himself but thought harmless.

Indeed Searle himself is forced to accept the dichotomy in his later
chapter on proper names. He is opposed, for reasons that need not concern
us here, to the causalist theory of proper names. His own theory involves
ostension, and so perception, and it therefore also depends on causation.
"But it is Intentional causation, internal to the perceptual content, it
is useless to the causal theorist in his effort to give an external causal
account of the relation of name to object. ... To give the ostensive definition
the perceiver had to perceive the object and that involves more than the
physical impact of the object on the nervous system" (235). Here Searle
is himself acknowledging that the relationship between the Intentional
content and its object is different than the relationship between objects
in the world, in effect reinstating the transcendental dichotomy.

INTERLEVEL CAUSATION
AND THE MIND-BODY PROBLEM

Finally, let us turn to the relationship between Intentional states
and their physical infrastructure, that is, to the mind-body problem. The
naturalist position must not only attribute logical and Intentional properties
to psychological states, but must relate these psychological states to
neurological processes. Searle, in the Epilogue to his book, offers an
account of the relation of mind and body compatible with his naturalistic
theory of Intentionality. He contrasts his theory with two traditional
ones, interactionism and the identity theory. The interactionists maintain
that mental states are caused by neural events. Identity theorists claim
that mental states and physical states are the same thing under different
aspects or descriptions, and so one cannot cause the other; the most one
can say is that the mental is realized in the physical. Searle wants it
both ways: Mental states are realized in and also cause, and are caused
by, physical states. To achieve this he must, once again, modify the received
notion of causality.

He conceives of the mind and mental states as higher level biological
states of the organism, similar in their logical status to the functionings
of the kidney. His thesis is that "two phenomena can be related by both
causation and realization provided that they are so at different levels
of description" (266). Thus the liquidity of water is both caused by and
realized in its molecular structure. In an engine, the rise in temperature
of the gases is caused by and realized in the movement of electrons across
the spark-plug gap, and the resultant explosion in the cylinder is caused
by and realized in the oxidation of the molecules. Thirst, as a mental
state, is caused by and realized in certain neural events, probably in
the hypothalamus. (We should note that Searle is speaking here of external,
physical causality, and makes no reference to his doctrine of Intentional
causation in this context, except insofar as all our notions of causality
are derived from our "experience" of Intentional causation.)

I have no problem with liquidity being realized in the molecular structure,
but I think that Searle is wrong in claiming that it is caused by this
structure. Searle claims that "if...we alter the molecular structure we
cause the surface features to change" (266). This is nonsense. It is like
the claim that we can cause someone to be married by making him a spouse;
these are two descriptions of the same event, so one cannot be the cause
of the other. We can heat the ice, or pass an electric current through
it, and it will melt, but this is causality on the surface level only.
We can say that a stream of electrons changes the molecular movements,
and this is causality on the microlevel. I can even accept, as does Searle,
to say that we can heat the ice and so cause the molecular structure to
change. But the change of molecular structure cannot cause the melting,
it is the melting.

This should be particularly evident if we realize that the above citation
could just as well have been: "if we alter the surface features we cause
the molecular structure to change." Could a causal relationship be symmetrical
in this way? Even if Searle were right that the causal relation is not
essentially unobservable or regular, some defining characteristics
must remain. Should we say that, as a minimum requirement, the cause must
precede the effect?

Searle might object to this by calling on a distinction he makes between
"causings" and other causal relations. "The billiard ball is gravitationally
attracted to the center of the earth" is not, he claims, a relation between
events, and so is not a causing, but it is nonetheless a causal relation
(116). Perhaps only causings require an antecedence relation between a
cause and an effect. But this objection would lead nowhere, for, I maintain,
causal relations which are not causings are not explanatory either. Only
events, not objects, can be explained. The presence of an object, or its
possession of a property, are events explainable by causings, but an object's
causal relations (if they are not causings) do not explain anything. Clearly,
however, molecular structure is meant to explain liquidity. So Searle
could not escape in this way the requirement that a cause must precede
its effect.

But could he not argue that even causings do not require antecedence?
Could an object's falling not be explained as caused by the action of gravity
which occurs simultaneously with the fall? Maybe; but we still could not
say that the falling caused the gravity. Some priority must be given to
the cause, even if it is not a temporal priority. The cause must be independent
of the effect; the cause must be independently variable, or, at the very
least, there must be an asymmetry which allows us to distinguish cause
and effect. If the relationship between two events is symmetrical, then
it is not a causal relation.

Hence, since melting the ice involves changing the molecular structure
just as certainly as changing the structure involves melting the ice, the
relationship is symmetrical and therefore not a causal one.

We might be misled by the pragmatic fact that, in the case of human
intervention, we more usually describe what we do as melting the ice, and
so might be led to think of the changing molecular structure as less direct.
But referring to the change in molecular structure is at most an inappropriate
mode of description in the context of action; it is not a reference to
a separate event brought about indirectly by means of melting the ice.
We could also be misled by the fact that the molecules explain the
liquidity and not vice versa, but this is a different matter. Many explanations
are non-causal. The motion of the earth can be explained by the premises
that all planets move in ellipses, and the earth is a planet, but neither
premise offers a cause for that motion. To explain the surface properties
of water by reference to the microlevel, or to explain thirst neurophysiologically,
does not necessarily involve a claim that the lower level causes the
higher.

It therefore seems that Searle's claim that Intentional states can be
causally related to the brain states in which they are realized must be
rejected. So even if Searle had been able to adequately explain the relationship
between Intentional, mental and/or psychological states, the final naturalistic
step of linking them to their physical realization is still incomplete.

CONCLUSION

Naturalizing Intentionality is not, then, as easy a task as Searle might
have hoped. Some of the difficulty lies in the lack of a clear definition
of the project. On the one hand he wants to treat Intentional states as
biological functions, like those of the stomach or kidney (15), which exist
in the physical world and can be investigated by the methods of the physical
("serious") sciences (263). On the other hand, he insists, "there really
are such things as intrinsic mental phenomena which cannot be reduced to
something else or eliminated by some kind of redefinition" (262). So his
project is not one of reduction. He is clear only that naturalism involves
the rejection of transcendentalism.

At the very minimum, however, we could expect his project to explicate
the relationships between Intentional states and reality. Three relationships
are crucial to this endeavour. The logical structure of Intentionality
must be realized in psychological states; it must be related to the object
Intended; and it must be related to brain states. Searle seems oblivious
to the first relationship, escaping the difficulties by a shifting use
of terms. The second is explained by the use of "Intentional causation",
his major inspiration, but this notion, I have tried to show, fails to
overcome the transcendental dichotomy. The third he explains as an ordinary
causal relationship, but only, I have suggested, by abusing the notion
of cause.

Searle's logical analysis of Intentionality is interesting and promising,
but the supporting ontological framework of mental, psychological and brain
states, and the causal relationships between them are still problematic.
In particular, the transcendentalist's radical distinction between Intentionality
and objects of any kind has not been overcome. Intentionality may be naturalizable,
but has not, as yet, been naturalized.

1. This paper grew out of discussions at a seminar
of the McGill Philosophy Department. I gratefully acknowledge the hospitality
and inspiration of the participants.

2. This is an oversimplification. For Husserl, the
psychical is an much a constituted, objective realm as the physical; Intentionality
is attributed to the Transcendental Ego, not the empirical ego. Searle
ignores this point and attributes Intentionality to loosely defined "mental
states." He is therefore using Intentionality more in Brentano's sense
than Husserl's. I cannot, however, discuss this problem here.

3. John Searle, Intentionality (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1983). All in-text references are to this work.